Today the Daily Mail dug in its heels by continuing to attack Ralph Miliband and his son.

But the Labour leader isn’t backing down. Here is the email he just sent to Labour members:

On Saturday and last night the Daily Mail printed stories about my Dad. The headlines called him “The man who hated Britain.”

There was a time when politicians stayed silent if this kind of thing happened, in the hope that it wouldn’t happen again. I will not do that. This isn’t about me and my family – this is about doing what’s right.

It is perfectly legitimate for the Daily Mail to talk about my father’s politics but when they say that he hated Britain, I was not willing to put up with that.

My father loved Britain. After he arrived in Britain as a refugee from Nazi Germany, he joined the Royal Navy. He did so because he was determined to be part of the fight against the Nazis and to help his family hidden in Belgium. He was fighting for Britain.

Britain was a source of hope and comfort for my dad, not hatred. He loved Britain for the security it offered his family and the gentle decency of our nation. The simple truth is something has really gone wrong when a newspaper attacks the family of a politician – any politician – in this way. I won’t stay silent when it happens – that’s why I have written a reply in today’s Mail. I hope you take a moment to read it, and then say you won’t stay silent either. We can be better than this.

The New Labour rulebook would tell Miliband to avoid picking a fight with the Daily Mail because of its popularity with Middle England.

But this is not how Miliband does things.

For a start, Miliband’s team know the political power of the press has declined significantly along with their circulations. Plus, people’s attitudes have changed, they don’t take cues on who to vote for from newspaper proprietors like they used to. The inability of most of the press to deliver a majority for Cameron (despite Gordon Brown’s unpopularity) in 2010 finally killed the illusion that newspapers have a major influence on elections.

The Daily Mail is doing his job for him. If people see Miliband as being fearless against the Daily Mail, they won’t see him as ‘weak Ed’. He should keep the controversy going.

Lastly, the Mail’s strident invective makes it harder for the newspaper to influence the election in 2015. Everyone now knows it has already made up its mind about Miliband and they’ll see the coverage through that prism. This is why most newspapers wait until the very last to declare their support – to give the illusion they’re not biased towards one side.

The Mail has already revealed its hand and that makes it much harder for it to pretend to be a neutral observer of British politics until 2015. As a precedent, the Sun ditched Gordon Brown /Labour seven months before the election in 2010, but to its dismay saw polls move in favour of Brown after declaring he shouldn’t be elected.

Given that Cameron & Clegg have stood by Miliband I suspect Dacre might be sweating a bit now. He’s made a huge, miscalculated gamble in trying to claim a red menace in the hope he can prevent next week’s Privy Council from implementing the Royal Charter on press standards agreed after the Leveson Inquiry.

“The Daily Mail, using the words of a dead man, written when that man was just 17 years old, is demonstrating that it is the lowest of low newspapers.”

What’s new?

Recall this well-known quote from a speech made Stanley Baldwin, Conservative Party leader 1923-37, on 17 March 1931, about the press owned by Lords Rothermere and Beaverbrook:

“The newspapers attacking me are not newspapers in the ordinary sense,” Baldwin said. “They are engines of propaganda for the constantly changing policies, desires, personal vices, personal likes and dislikes of the two men. What are their methods? Their methods are direct falsehoods, misrepresentation, half-truths, the alteration of the speaker’s meaning by publishing a sentence apart from the context…What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.”http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2011/03/power-without-responsibility.html

Try the Wikipedia entry for: Vere Harold Esmond Harmsworth, 3rd Viscount Rothermere (27 April 1925 – 1 September 1998), known as Vere Harmsworth until 1978, was a British newspaper magnate. He controlled large media interests in the United Kingdom and United States and may be considered the founder of The Mail on Sunday.

Presumably, this smear of Ralph Miliband would also apply had David Miliband been elected leader of the Labour Party instead of his brother Ed. But what of their mother, Ralph Miliband’s wife, the mother of David and Ed? Surely the Mail isn’t going to skimp on this. Perhaps she had subversive opinions too. I think we should know. While we are about it, what about those foreign grandparents?

Btw Benjamin Disraeli’s grand parents were immigrants and look what that led to – all that seditious stuff about One Nation Conservatism. I thought the Conservatives had managed to bury that embarrassing heritage when they finally closed down the Primrose League in December 2004.

Its delightful, seeing Britain’s Volkischer Beobachter (but with added pap pics of celebs and extra creepy “all grown up” ones of celebs’ children) finally getting what it deserves. Private Eye has run several pieces on Paul “Mugabe” Dacre (£2 million pa for this trash) being on his way out to be replaced by Geordie Greig of the Heil On Sunday and I’m sure this debacle will do nothing to extend his tenure. All we want now is an explanation from Rothermere as to why he still deserves non-dom tax status just because his ancestors had it.

Curiously enough, comments on the Daily Mail article stopped about 5 hours ago, although they did not say that comments were closed. The majority of comments opposed the disgraceful Mail attacks on a dead WW2 serviceman.

In the 1930s Rothermere used his newspapers to try to influence British politics, notably being a strong supporter of appeasement towards Nazi Germany In the 1930s, he urged increased defence spending by Britain; his were the only major newspapers to advocate an alliance with Germany. For a time in 1934, the Rothermere papers championed the British Union of Fascists (BUF), and were again the only major papers that did so. Rothermere infamously wrote a Daily Mail editorial entitled “Hurrah for the Blackshirts”, in January 1934, praising Oswald Mosley for his “sound, commonsense, Conservative doctrine”.

Rothermere visited and corresponded with Hitler. On 1 October 1938, Rothermere sent Hitler a telegram in support of Germany’s invasion of the Sudetenland, and expressing the hope that ‘Adolf the Great’ would become a popular figure in Britain. He was also aware of the military threat from the resurgent Germany, of which he warned J. C. C. Davidson, then Chairman of the Conservative Party.

Numerous secret British MI5 papers related to the war years, were declassified and released in 2005. They show that Rothermere wrote to Adolf Hitler in 1938 congratulating him for the annexation of Czechoslovakia, and encouraging him to invade Romania. He described Hitler’s work as “great and superhuman”.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Harmsworth,_1st_Viscount_Rothermere

Evidently, Stanley Baldwin’s reservations about the Rothermere press barons were well-founded. In the light of Viscount Rothermere’s personal regard for Hitler and the Nazis, as reported by MI5, the recent focus on Ralph Miliband’s ethnicity and his flight to Britain as a refugee before WW2 are illuminating.

It has been suggested that it was newspaper advertisers threatening to pull the plug who caused rothermere to stop his antisemitism (though he continued to be a Nazi sympathiser).

I do wonder whether the article is partly driven by antisemitism – to very loudly tell the nation that Ed Milliband has Jewish parents. I am normally highly sceptical of what is passed off as anti-semitism, but these guys have form.

The irony is that it appears that the supposed expressions of anti-British views attributed to Ralph Miliband were approximately contemporaneous with the expressions of support for the Nazis and Herr Hitler by Viscount Rothermere. But it would be unfair to blame the Conservatives for him. After all, Stanley Baldwin – Conservative Party leader 1923-37 – had a stark appreciation of Lord Rothermere’s character and his political inclinations, as had MI5.

By some extraordinary lapse, it seems not to have occurred to Mail editorial staff to compare and contrast the supposed anti-British sentiments of Ralph Miliband with what Lord Rothermere was saying and writing about the Nazis and Herr Hitler at about the same time. That would, at least, have put the youthful sentiments of Ralph Miliband into historic context. Possibly, he mistakenly assumed that the views of Lord Rothermere were more widely held in Britain than, in fact, they were.

The Daily Mail might consider looking into the fact that an official phone number for Iain Duncan Smith’s Leadership campaign was in fact for the house of Nick Griffin’s father, a Vice-President of that campaign, who answered that phone with the words “British National Party”. That was not in the 1930s. It was not even in the 1960s. It was in the present century.

Then there are the youthful ties of numerous members of the present Government to apartheid South Africa and to Pinochet’s Chile. And then there are the Nazi sympathisers in the aristocratic backgrounds of many an MP from either Coalition party. Cameron himself is related by marriage (so, a matter of his choice) to none other than the Astors.

Oh dear, it seems I spoke too soon and this is lapsing into very well-trodden territory. Rather than playing “who liked Hitler in the 1930s”, I suggest it would be more worthwhile to challenge the right-wing narrative of the Cold War – you know, the one Maggie and Ronnie won.

By some extraordinary lapse, it seems not to have occurred to Mail editorial staff to compare and contrast the supposed anti-British sentiments of Ralph Miliband with what Lord Rothermere was saying and writing about the Nazis and Herr Hitler at about the same time.

The Daily Mail never took money from the Nazis, never supported surrender to the Nazis and never openly called for a significant percentage of the British population to be murdered.

That puts them in a completely different category to Miliband Senior. Even if we ignore the specious comparison of one newspaper article by a senile old man with a lifetimes work by a vigorous one.

But it is interesting to see so many people think that the present Lord Rothermere should be ashamed of what his great-grandfather did, even though he has never shared any of those views, but Miliband Minor should not be ashamed of his father even though he did and it seems does.

I would be very surprised if not a single writer/contributor to the Daily Mail had at least one left wing parent. Fleet Street is full of Marxists, ex-Marxists and Dad-was-Marxist/Dad-was-ex-Marxists.

This could get very embarrassing for the Mail.

So the fact they were all doing it means it was alright?

Miliband Senior chose the wrong side in the Cold War. He chose the side that murdered the most people. But luckily the Right is vastly more forgiving than his friends were and we did not execute his entire family. He should have been a little bit grateful for that.

Interesting that they chose a Jewish writer to do the hatchet job, just in the case the charges of antisemitism came hurtling forward…

They will anyway. It is par for the course where Stalinists are concerned.

Mosley, of course, was a former Labour minister, but I don’t think too much should be read into that. Many were seduced by charismatic authoritarians in the chaos following the Great War. The past, as they say, is a different country.

Milliband Senior was a fool.
Milliband Junior is right to stick up for him.
The Mail is scraping the barrel.

26. So Much For Subtlety
‘Though committed to socialism, he never hesitated to criticise its distortion by Stalin and other dictators. He also inveighed against the timidity and limited horizons of West European social democracy. The ideal he sought was a democratic and open Marxism.’ Obituary: Professor Ralph Miliband. Daily Telegraph.

According to today’s Guardian in looks like Mugabe is staying put, what he must know about Rothermere couldn’t have had anything to do with it. I notice he didn’t defend the article on Newsnight, instead a minion was torn to shreds. Ed Miliband is on to a winner here, Labour should give up trying to appease the right wing papers who treat the party like an abused partner. Labour should go further on the press, promising a thorough investigation into the tax affairs of all the proprietors and they should do their best to ensure Dacre never gets the knighthood he wants.

I used to work for the vile Daily Mail. I won a substantial out of court settlement ( no gagging agreement..) after management decided to bully me during my mothers last few weeks of her fight against cancer. There’s a lot of dirty washing at Associated, which will never see the light of day. The commercial director fired for sexual harassment & inappropriate behavior…the bunch of employees whom while dining at a conference in Hamburg, chose to sing Springtime for Hitler & do the “goosestep” around the restaurant. Sir David English was a different kind of man to Dacre, whom I hope is steering the Daily Mail into commercial oblivion…

The odd thing is that the original article was fairly unexceptional – basically splashing on the ‘news’ that Ralph Miliband was very left wing, even by the standards of the Labour party in the 70s. One line in the article referred to RM’s ‘adolescent distaste’ for Britain in re the 17 yr old quote.

It was the headline (and the online pictures) that generated all this entirely reasonable and justified distaste. The subsequent editorial was even worse. It smacks very strongly of Dacre wanting a confrontation with Miliband, regardless of the strength of his position. Really very odd.

Here is an interesting and pertinent excerpt from the Leveson enquiry, where Jonathan Harmsworth – majority owner of the paper – was being cross examined:

LEVESON: You said just a moment ago “That it is important that all political parties feel able to approach me if they feel they have been treated unfairly”. Maybe we are going to come back to that but can I just pick up that answer for one moment and ask this: Is that well known? In other words do the major political parties know…. that if… er… they feel that the Daily Mail editorial line is treating them unfairly they could come to you?
HARMSWORTH: erm… I… I… Sir – I don’t know what they think. Erm… certainly when I have had meetings with politicians they have expressed …erm… – of all parties – expressed unhappiness with some of the coverage in the newspaper. Erm… Largely I refer them back to Paul Dacre. But if there is an instance which I feel justifies merit then I may well bring that up with Paul, and say that he – recommend he look into it and talk to that politician to seek out the truth. So if they say we run something which is blatantly untrue and that is probably- … I… I won’t get involved on a… on a… on a level of opinion . But if someone comes to me and says “your newspaper has printed an untruth, it is categorically a mistake”, then I will say to Paul, “This person has written to me or” – and it is normally a letter – “complaining about this, which they say this is untrue and would you please look into it”. And he and the legal team look into and then either talk to the politician and sort it out directly, or write back to me and say there is no truth in it. [sniggers] Sometimes people have different opinion of the truth
LEVESON: So it’s just a system that has built up, it’s not something that you’ve…. made known?
HARMSWORTH: No. I er well erm Yes it is not something I have made known, and to be honest I don’t really invite it —and er you know… Because I I don’t think that I don’t wish to get into a position of having to constantly dealing with this issue – because obviously The newspaper is writing controversial things all the time. So… it is onl-
LEVESON: – That’s why I asked you the question.
HARMSWORTH:Yes. Yes. [nods and pause]

Since you have repeatedly shown yourself to be a staunch supporter of fascists, why don’t you also support Hitler’s bosom buddy (at least till he was betrayed by operation Barbarosa) the vile paranoid psychopathic power junkie Joseph Stalin?

Ralph Miliband, like thousands of other Marxists, fought in WW2, it was a period notable for the collaboration of communism and capitalism against the fascism which emerged in the 1930s. Hitler was defeated and the USSR was subsequently dismantled.

The history of the emergence of the USSR under Stalin has always thrown a shadow over socialism even though it did not represent socialism or Marxism in any way, shape or form. Thatcher was fortunate enough to be in power during the cold war and when the USSR crumbled and she was easily able to exploit the association between that state with socialism.

But it isn’t Ralph Miliband’s marxist leanings or Thatcher’s historical rantings or indeed the right-wing views of SMFS and others who have enabled the negative association with socialism and Ed M’s proposal to freeze energy prices, that particular merit belongs to one Tony Blair and his new lab cronies and their rejection of socialism.

Less the sins of the fathers and more the chickens coming back to roost.

It seems you can take the student hack out of the Uni but not the Uni out of the student hack.

Getting into a spat with the Daily Mail might impress the more Pavlovian of the Labour True Believers in his base but the DM won’t be standing in the next elections against Labour. His actual opponents have neaty sidestepped the fight, covered their backsides with a little muted support for poor Little Ed crying over his insulted Daddy, like prefects consoling the new boy after his head is shoved down the toilet, and are now enjoying the spectacle of Labour proving more and more than they have sent in a boy to do a man’s job.

I’ll give you a hint Sunny – you will lose if you act like you are at war with the DM and the people who read it. Obviously you learnt nothing from Blair – unlike Cameron, ironically.

Even that zionist Jew, 5th columnist ogre Salmond, is misleading the Scots numbskulls into a false breakup of the UK
– classic ‘divide & conquer’ strategy

The zionist Jews have infiltrated all our/europes Elite class, marrying into them (even Prince George is an Ashkenazi Jew thru his mother, born on a jewish full moon too!)

They hate the Christians of our country cos they hate Jesus(they killed him for cash)

You fecking UK, Christian?, dumbed down oiks don’t realise how they much they are pulling the wool over your eyes whilst they VEX (Hebrew gematria under No 33) & fleece you to within an inch of your lives!

Its this zionist scum who run the Masons encourage Muslim/other immigration and UK takeover by fund-a-mentals

Even Hitler was half Rothschild Jew(Rothschild banks remained open for German Army all over Europe)
Hitler protected the Austrian Hitler family jewish Dr (and his family) until they left to go to USA

The zionist Jews killed millions? of their own so they could hoodwink everyone into this anti-semite bollox and holocaust guilt trip!

@40. steveb: “Hitler was defeated and the USSR was subsequently dismantled.”

A lot of history occurred between those two events. For Communist Party members, three occasions are notable: Khrushchev 1956, Hungary 1956 and Prague Spring 1968.

When considering Ralph Miliband, the events are inconsequential. From everything I understand, he was not a member of the CPGB or a follower. Ralph Miliband was an independent Marxist who led his own life.

I read the article to see what the fuss was all about.
The article was fine albeit a bit uncomfortable reading for people who regard Marxist lecturers as benignly as other relics from their days at college.

The headline over-egged the pudding a bit and it would have been better to say R Miliband was contemptuous of the main stands of British society rather than hated Britain – but that would be a headparagragh.

Having said all that it’s a bit rich for Ed Miliband (who is rich enough already) to leap to his father’s defence without at least acknowledging that it was his repeat references to his parentage and upbringing that had reintroduced his father into the spotlight. It would appear it’s fine to voice nice thoughts about R Miliband but not unflattering ones.

Either way it doesn’t look pretty especially at a time when we are seriously considering letting politicians have greater say in what papers can publish. Soon we’ll hear protests from Gerry Adams about any unflattering mention of the antics of his brother.

50. Kojak
What? Ed M had a father? Oh dear, we can’t have that sort of thing.
So, in your mind, if a politician mentions their father it’s okay for a national newspaper to carry out a smear attack? What sort of sick circle do orbit?
The DM article is worse than that fat lazy shit criticising Jack Straw’s father on Question Time.

Are you paid by Johnathan Harmsworth? Remember, when fascists won the propaganda war in Germany, Hitler’s voters lost big style, firstly because his policies nearly bankrupted Germany, which is why he started wars of aggression with his neighbours, when they were subsequently railroaded into becoming bullet catchers for the öber Fuhrer. How did that work out for them? I’ll give you a clue, towards the end even their children were pushed onto the front line!

If you strangely think Mr Harsworth isn’t a fascist, explain why his filthy rag peddles such vile propaganda we are all aware of, consistently, for decades.

@ Alistair Stott, 4.49pm October 2

Taken the test. I am proud to say I’m hated by that treacherous wipe of my pet dog’s sloppy no.2’s. Shared on my Facebook 😀

I’d like to take this opportunity to endorse Ralph Miliband’s views in their entirety. Decent bloke though his son seems to be, I’d much rather have the Dad as Prime Minister, even though he was probably too clever to be a politician.

Either way it doesn’t look pretty especially at a time when we are seriously considering letting politicians have greater say in what papers can publish.

No we aren’t.

However; bear in mind that the politician’s immediate reaction to a deliberate and vicious lie was to – condemn it and demand a right of reply. The paper’s response to the reply was to double down on the lie. And then to complain that the politician was acting out of order. I’m sorry, I can see no danger to a free press in that scenario; apart of course from the public reaction to the Mail‘s antics.

I don’t consider press owned by a billionaire to be free in any way. It has to do the owner’s diktats, no matter what the oaf dissembles publicly. In the case of the Daily Mail for example, Dacre is the attack dog doing his masters bidding – and everyone has to toe the line…

I didn’t say anything was wrong, I said that you have missed my point and, although I could read your post, I did not grasp your point. And I still don’t understand, why you are reiterating that R Miliband never joined a party or a movement, I never suggested that he had.

“They hate the Christians of our country cos they hate Jesus(they killed him for cash)”

Jesus was a Jew too. The clue is in his name…
As for the rest of your diatribe, grow up. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is another century’s zombie myth, Which was peddled for the then economic elite’s benefit, no matter the cost to the people of that century.

50. Kojak
You have read a Daily Mail article and told us what you thought the article said. But you have not questioned whether every statement in it is true.

So when you say “it would have been better to say R Miliband was contemptuous of the main stands of British society rather than hated Britain – but that would be a headparagragh” You have not queried whether he was contemptuous or not.

Here is what John Moore, a minister for the Tories under Thatcher recalls of him: “Ralph Miliband taught me and I can say he was one of the most inspiring and objective teachers I had. Of course, we had different political opinions but he never treated me with anything less than complete courtesy and I had profound respect for his integrity….He had come here as a refugee, done his duty to his adopted country by serving in our Royal Navy during the war, become a great academic and raised a good family….I saw him week after week and it beggars belief that the Daily Mail can accuse him of lacking patriotism. I never heard him ever say one word which was negative about Britain – our country….The Daily Mail is telling lies about a good man who I knew. The people of this country are good and decent too. They do not want the Daily Mail attacking the dead relatives of politicians to make political points.”

Now, go and read the article again, and this time CHECK THE FACTS. You can do the same with my parody in another post if you wish, but I was meticulous to only rely on reliable information.

I am no friend of Ed Miliband and I personally think him along with everyone in the Brown cabal is unfit for high office let alone the Office of the Prime Minister. Saying that, I completely support his stance on Dacre who is a loathsome individual and a bloody bully & coward.

Yet, I disagree with Sunny that this has electoral advantages – I doubt it has especially since Daily Mail has been condemned by the Prime Minister, the Deputy PM both present and former and a bunch of Thatcherite Tories. Continuing the attack on Daily Mail and also trying to imply that Tories were somehow behind this as the idiotic Labour MP John Mann did today is going to turn people off rather than get them towards Miliband.

Also, while people have all the sympathies for MIliband for standing up for his father – not many people in this country or elsewhere would be enamored of the Marxist views expressed by Miliband Senior – and that is a fact. By continuing the onslaught on the Daily Hate, it might in fact make the association of the marxist views of Miliband senior and Ed Miliband’s policies of land grab by government, price fixes in many people’s minds. And going back to the 70s is not an option for most Brits.

I know that would be flawed because I don’t think any one of those policies have been well thought through and most likely would not be implemented as much as the policy of denying any state benefits to under 25s by Cameron today. Unintended consequences of policies have not been calculated – that was one thing both parties need to learn from Labour under Blair (read Iraq)…and that was a hugely popular leader who won a bigger majority than Thatcher even in 2005.

Going back to the point – Daily Mail is a rag of the worst sort – deny it the oxygen…it has pissed off many people on all sides especially in the centre…Don;t push it would be my advice but then Brown cabal never had the political vision – they think short term and as I said totally unfit for office.

Each month of the year is a lunar month, beginning on the new moon and ending when the moon is dark. Jews celebrate the first day of the month, the new moon or Rosh Chodesh, as a minor holiday. Sometime during the first two weeks of the month, often at the end of the Sabbath, Jews recite a blessing over the moon in gratitude for having been given the cycles of time. In the last week of the month, on the morning of the Sabbath, Jews announce the name and date of the coming month both as a welcome and a reminder to the community.

Thank you ever so much for quoting verbatim a former Tory minister to help prove the sincerity of your meticulous post.

I’ll ask you a question which shouldn’t be too tricky to answer:

Since what point would any self respecting Marxist not be contemptuous of the major strands of British society and it’s institutions which predominated early/mid 20th century? The inequalities of the class system, faith in and deference towards authority, the status quo and the role of the established political parties etc etc?

As I said The Mail over-egged the pudding with it’s “Hated Britain…” headline when what they were trying to say was “Lying Commie / Useful Idiot”. They should have stuck to what they meant as it would have been just as offensive but given Ed Miliband less chance to act like the heroic son championing his father’s memory.

Let’s not forget that Ed Miliband’s constant references to his his father’s legacy in addition to Ralph Miliband’s many achievements as an academic and political motivator put him firmly in the spotlight for people to discuss. Unless that is you would prefer we don’t mention the dead for rear of insulting their memory.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Miliband

I don’t happen to think The Mail are half as stupid as many here are suggesting and suspect Ed Miliband has been baited into a trap.

The imminent reforms of the press which he advocates don’t ring quite so loud coming from a person of considerable standing and privilege currently embroiled in a spat with the papers – as opposed to the many individuals whose lives have really been blighted by the papers. He’s made it too personal and could be accused of turning a campaign into a vendetta.

PS: Before you get all indignant about Paul Dacre please remember who was the only Fleet St editor prepared to run with the killing of Stephen Lawrence and seek justice for his family? All of the other papers didn’t have the resolve to put their reputations on the line and name those involved as murderers.

The Telegraph, unlike, say Polly Toynbee and the Guardian, has a civilised obituary section. They do not smear the dead. Was RM a friend of democracy? No. You can read anything he wrote you like. He wrote books explaining why democracy was not a good idea. He had thoroughly unpleasant politics.

Which is not to say the DM should be bringing it up. But let’s not make RM out to be anything other than he was – no different from any other jackbooted thug.

steveb

Ralph Miliband, like thousands of other Marxists, fought in WW2

Three years in the Royal Navy. That would be 1945, 1944 and 1943. An interesting choice of dates to serve. So it turns out he joined the Royal Navy after the war had been won.

The history of the emergence of the USSR under Stalin has always thrown a shadow over socialism even though it did not represent socialism or Marxism in any way, shape or form.

Actually no. Stalin did, of course, represent socialism and Marxism. At least you need to think of a reason why he didn’t. And why a socialist, a thoroughly socialist, system can execute all the capitalists, bring all the factories under the control of the workers and still turn out worse than anything Capitalism or Imperialism has ever done. What techtonic plates of history does Stalin represent? Which class? Whose economic interest?

Thatcher was fortunate enough to be in power during the cold war and when the USSR crumbled and she was easily able to exploit the association between that state with socialism.

Because, like it or not, Stalinism remains the biggest and most successful attempt to apply socialism in practice. You may not like it, you may want to distance yourself from it now, but there is no denying they tried it. And it failed. Something you need to explain.

The Mail’s article is primarily built around lies and deceipt, a spiteful, twisted distortion of half truths, and statements stripped of their original context or meaning.

It is very much as if it was written by someone now looking for work, as penning climate change denial pieces dries up.

So by all means reflect on what influence Ralph Milliband had on Ed, but that reflection should be based on a balanced evaluation of the evidence. You must disregard just about everything the article discusses.

Do I think self respecting Marxist’s are likely to be contemptuous of British institutions? I know very few who see themselves as such. I imagine from the more radical people I have known or have met over the years, that they are more likely to be angry than contemptuous – Angry at the institutions not serving the people as well as they ought, because a few people have appropriate the benefit. That could come across as being hugely compassionate for people as a whole – or be seen as a threatening bully (it depends on whether you prefer to be Weak standing up to the Strong or Strong against the weak). I don’t know if Ralph Milliband was like that, I never read him, nor have I read his books. I find John Moore’s view far more credible.

Now lets get back on to the Daily Mail, as there is more scrutiny they need to be held to here.

Jews were the main Slave trader monopoly in eastern europe 1200AD.
Loads of Spanish Sephardics became hugely rich flogging Europeans to Africans(you can see why they were kicked out-pushing locals to the limits)

Jews owned most of the slave boats and were the ‘middle men’ buying and selling black africans on the triangle West indies>London>ivory/gold coast

Majority of Londons banks and insurance companies became rich of back of slavery.

The Mail’s article is primarily built around lies and deceipt, a spiteful, twisted distortion of half truths, and statements stripped of their original context or meaning. …. I don’t know if Ralph Milliband was like that, I never read him, nor have I read his books.

I see. You know nothing about what Ralph Miliband thought or said but you also know everything the Daily Mail said was lies. Interesting.

Now lets get back on to the Daily Mail, as there is more scrutiny they need to be held to here.

Yes it is so annoying when the Working Class refuse to renounce their False Consciousness isn’t it? So galling that the Faily Mail and not the Guardian is the world’s most popular internet news site.

But I don’t notice many people objecting to anything the Mail said. It is not as if it wasn’t true or anything.

We’ve been here before SMFS, btw, have you settled back into school? Imo, attempting to build socialism on the base of what was left of Imperial Russia was insane, it could never work, it was tantamount to building houses on quicksand. On the other hand, the USSR was one of our best allies against Hitler, Stalin’s accelerated industrialization enabled it to fight on an equal level to the German army. Ralph M and thousands of other marxists fought against Hitler, many lost their lives.

70

Ralph Miliband was a marxist and therefore, totally against any capitalist institutions and also the institution of the monarchy. He would have supported all of the working-class in those countries under threat from fascism and, like many others, fought under the banner of capitalism.

The daily fail have merely looked at marxist ideology and like most right-wing press have distorted it in order to attempt to slur Ed M by association. There are few people who believe that Ed and his party have any socialist aspirations.

“Yes it is so annoying when the Working Class refuse to renounce their False Consciousness isn’t it? So galling that the Faily Mail and not the Guardian is the world’s most popular internet news site.”

Johnathan Harmsworth isn’t as rich as he used to be. He must have paid for a lot of website banners etc. People are naturally lazy and just click on what they see on their screen…

A certain morbid curiosity is also involve somewhere – what vile bollocks have they published today? It’s the same motivation that leads to commuters slowing down to gawp at the car crash on the motorway, or in the past attend “a good hanging”.

Though I wouldn’t expect you to be able to make such a connection, it requires sentient level coding 😉

Ralph Miliband arrived in Britain fleeing the Nazis, his sister and mother in Nazi-occupied Belgium, and wondered why so many Britons supported appeasement and why so much of the Establishment, Rothermere included, openly supported Hitler and the Nazis as well as Mussolini and other fascists. Even Edward VII, former king, was a fan.

Rothermere’s paean to the Nazis in July 1933, Nazi Youth in Control, was published after the Reichstag fire, the brutal suppression of thousands of communists and the Nazi takeover of all civilian organisations except for the churches, and after he abolished the trade unions, seized their funds and arrested their leaders – presumably alluded to by Rothermere as “the liberation of that country” and “a few isolated acts of violence”. It was published after the Enabling Act, which allowed Hitler to pass laws, even if they violated the Constitution, absent the consent of the President or the Reichstag, and after he banned social democrats (the communists were already banned) from the Reichstag, and made the founding of new parties illegal – presumably what Rothermere was referring to when he wrote “Germany’s political structure has been revolutionised, her Constitution remodelled”. It was published after Hitler declared a national boycott of Jewish-owned businesses (boycott meaning Nazis painting Stars of David on property and beating up Jews, some more “isolated acts of violence”, not just avoiding that business) and passed The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which banned and forced people of “non-Aryan descent” and political opponents to retire from government jobs, including teachers, professors, and judges (this had the effect of causing Albert Einstein to emigrate to the USA). Shortly afterward, a similar law was passed concerning lawyers, doctors, tax consultants, musicians, and notaries.

Four days after Rothermere’s article praising the Nazis, they passed a law that led to the forcible sterilisation of a few hundred thousand, and later commit yet more atrocities, but Rothermere and the Daily Mail would continue support until war was declared.

I think Ralph Miliband’s “contempt” (if indeed that was his feeling), as expressed in the offending diary entry he made at 16/17 that the Daily Mail seized upon, was quite understandable.

Imo, attempting to build socialism on the base of what was left of Imperial Russia was insane, it could never work, it was tantamount to building houses on quicksand.

It is strange that virtually no socialist thought so at the time. Rather than accepting that they had to wait until Capitalism had painlessly created the material basis for socialism, they thought they could do it better. If you admit that your lot can’t, we can make progress.

On the other hand, the USSR was one of our best allies against Hitler,

They spent a good part of the war on Hitler’s side and made his aggression possible. They were never our ally, just our co-belligerent.

Stalin’s accelerated industrialization enabled it to fight on an equal level to the German army.

There is no evidence that Stalin’s programme did anything but delay Russia’s industrialisation. And forcing soldiers and peasants over landmines at bayonet point may work but it is hardly fighting the Germans on an equal level. The insane butchery of Stalin’s policies meant that millions of Russians died needlessly. The German Army gave up and let the West enter Germany without a fight once they crossed the Rhine. The Soviets lost over 80,000 soldiers fighting in Berlin with another quarter of a million injured. More than Germany lost at Kursk. All because the Germans knew what a Soviet victory would mean and so fought on long passed the point of rationality.

Ralph M and thousands of other marxists fought against Hitler, many lost their lives.

Indeed they did. Not for Britain. For Marx.

Ralph Miliband was a marxist and therefore, totally against any capitalist institutions and also the institution of the monarchy.

And Parliament.

gastro george

Only in your parallel universe.

In the end rationality is not optional. By what possible definition was Stalinism not a deliberate and conscious attempt to create socialism?

Dissident

Johnathan Harmsworth isn’t as rich as he used to be.

Who cares?

ukliberty

Ralph Miliband arrived in Britain fleeing the Nazis, his sister and mother in Nazi-occupied Belgium, and wondered why so many Britons supported appeasement and why so much of the Establishment, Rothermere included, openly supported Hitler and the Nazis as well as Mussolini and other fascists. Even Edward VII, former king, was a fan.

Miliband arrived in Britain on May 19, 1940. Would you mind please pointing out to me anyone who said after that date in public that Hitler should be appeased? Or anyone who openly supported Hitler? I mean, all of Ralph’s friends in the Communist movement aside.

I think that we can all agree RM did not hear one single person outside the British Communist movement – of which Ralph was entirely supportive – supporting Hitler after he arrived in the UK.

It was published after Hitler declared a national boycott of Jewish-owned businesses (boycott meaning Nazis painting Stars of David on property and beating up Jews, some more “isolated acts of violence”, not just avoiding that business)

And RM’s oath at the grave of Karl Marx was taken after Lenin had executed millions and Stalin tens of millions. Do you have a point? You think it is worse for a Brit to have supported the, at that stage, relatively minor violence in Nazi Germany than the wholesale genocide going on in the USSR – and genocide that had been going on for twenty years?

Four days after Rothermere’s article praising the Nazis, they passed a law that led to the forcible sterilisation of a few hundred thousand

Something that the British Left warmly supported until 1945 or so – and something that Social Democratic Sweden, the idol of the British Left, continued to do without any protest from the Left until the mid-1970s.

I think Ralph Miliband’s “contempt” (if indeed that was his feeling), as expressed in the offending diary entry he made at 16/17 that the Daily Mail seized upon, was quite understandable.

Do you have a point? You think it is worse for a Brit to have supported the, at that stage, relatively minor violence in Nazi Germany than the wholesale genocide going on in the USSR – and genocide that had been going on for twenty years?

No, that’s something you invented about what I think.

I see you have run here after being trounced over at timworstall because you couldn’t support your notion that jobs can be created from thin air.

A question is not a statement of what you think. It is a request for more details about what you think. I notice your utter inability to show what you claimed. And I note your indifference to Ralph Miliband’s support for the mass murder that had been going on in the Soviet Union for 20 years when he first stepped foot in the UK, while focusing on the utterly harmless words of a few idiots.

I see you have run here after being trounced over at timworstall because you couldn’t support your notion that jobs can be created from thin air.

You need to catch-up on Trotsky, however, the Marxists supported the February revolutionary regime which were not socialist, it was only when it was clear that it was failing miserably that the Bolsheviks overthrew them in October. And it was the Czar who waged war on Germany, sending peasants with pop-pop guns over land-mines. Yes the USSR supported Germany, as a country, they had little alternative. At least it gave the USSR breathing space to industrialize, which was fortunate for the rest of us. Of course, you know this already but as the site’s revisionist historian, we expect no more from you.

R. Miliband fought against fascism for the working-class, Marx would certainly have supported those sentiments.

SMFS:
Ralph Miliband was 17 when he arrived in the UK, at a time when scholars and historians of all ideological hues were far from clear on exactly what was going on in the USSR. Shortly after he arrived, the UK government spent four years spreading the propaganda image of Stalin as our ally Uncle Joe. It’s absolutely batshit lunacy to blame him for that.

In the course of his academic career, he denounced Stalin, criticised the Soviet Hungarian and Czech invasions, and stated explicitly that western democracy deserved credit for respecting human rights far more than any communist regime had managed.

When you say something like, “You think it is worse for a Brit to have supported the, at that stage, relatively minor violence in Nazi Germany than the wholesale genocide going on in the USSR – and genocide that had been going on for twenty years?” when I haven’t suggested anything of the sort, it is your invention about what I think, or an implication I think something of the sort, either way you are a dishonest bell-end, which is why I rarely spend any time or effort replying to your spray-and-pray postings. 🙂

Stalin, Jew, married to Jewesses and surrounded himself with them. His real real name translates to JEWSON – you might have seen it somewhere (Zionist supremicist Jews secretly building another secret state symbology beware!
MEDIAN: 51 million deaths for the entire Stalin Era; 20M during the 1930s.
(Lenin was also a covered up Jew)
Median 9.5 Million deaths for Lenin Era

Stalin attempted to wipe out Orthodox church during this period – proof of their zionist hatred of Christ who taught Chritianity and Christians!

His righthand man in charge of gulags was a jew married to a jew relative.
Solzhenitsyn publicized an estimate of 60 million exterminated.

Churchill was a jew. His imported yank mother had a serpent tattoo around her wrist.He acted against the Germans first, bombing a defenceless German UNI town, Freiburg, which was not producing war materials, without warning, with 3 occult bomber formation leading to spark of war and retaliation by the germans/Hitler

These commanding Jew Leaders snuffed out the lives of 25 Million European Soldiers (mainly Christian)
The few million Jews the zionists snuffed out in camps pales into insignificance!
40 Million mainly White christian European Civilians were snuffed out.

Roosevelt Jew. Conjured up the atom bomb with fellow jews Plagiarist Einstein and man in charge of development “destroyer of Worlds” jew Oppenheimer!

Mussolini was mislead by a venetian(rothschild black bloodline)mistress. She was a leading light in his fascist party pumping out propaganda and influencing how the fascists behaved!

Hitler I already explained was a half Jew. His service girl grandmother had his father thru a union with a rothschild in Vienna where she worked.

Vienna is where jew carl marx used to meet a Rothschild in a cafe to get money and next orders off him!

Vienna was Rigsby’s CAT!
Rossiter the jew was caught up as a pervy accused in recent sex scandals.(Rigsby is symbolising a polish jew landlord “Perec Rachman” who terrorised his lodgers in Notting Hill.
(Rigsby is the piss-taking, occult-jewish diametric opposite as the ‘cowering’ landlord!)

CJ in Sunshine deserts is obviously JC (jesus Christ)occulty reversed by the writers!
[Dad was a wine connoisseur. He was introduced to the subject by his dear friend John Barron, who played CJ, “the boss from hell” in “Reggie Perrin”.]
Suss the clever ‘symbolism’?

Jew Hugh Grant made a film Notting hill in name flagging symbolism!
He was also a head hactivist in the Jew lead stitch-up, anti freedom of UK speech, Leveson Enquiry!

These Oligarch Russian Gangsters invited to London by Jew Cameron/osbourn are nearly all Jews, who have thieved & stripped the Russian Christians of all their wealth, plunging them into into poverty!

I can guess why these bastards continually persecute Russian Orthodox Christians – its cos the Russ beat the Askenazi around 1000AD and wiped out Khazaria their motherland where the parasites made themselves rich taking 10% of all goods on The Volga and the Silk Road crossroads!(Alternative was death)

Ring a bell of what is going on in the UK?

Later on Ashkenazi joined with brothers the Hun tribe and terrorised southern Europe. Christian King Charlemagne beat them after 7 yr war wiping out all their officers or anyone in charge.
They had pretended to be a poor tribe but on entering their towns they found Billions in Gold and Silver stashed away which Charlemagne shared out across his kingdom – a trait we know so well!

You have to Wunder why a blockbuster movie has never been made of this great Christian – his life story and achievements are truly fascinating (maybe the funders/makers of Western films are still sulking?)

So what I am getting from the Miliband Sr apologists is that he views towards communism were a bit like those of Nick Griffin’s towards Nazism – terrible mistakes were made, the wrong people were in charge, but the basic ideas were sound and it’s an experiment worth trying cautiously again.

Thanks for clearing up the misunderstanding, chaps, he does now sound like a jolly sensible fellow.

Completely out of order by the Daily Mail. That Paul Dacre needs to have his own personal life splashed across the media. To have his home staked out by journalists and photographers etc.

The annoying thing about this whole issue is, that the Mail treats their readership with contempt, as if no one could ever discuss the merits and otherwise of a concept like Marxism. And could not understand why our parliamentary system is not necessarily the only and best way of running a society.

“In 1944 when the 22-year old Ralph Miliband was bravely risking his life storming German positions protecting the Normandy beaches, Paul Dacre’s 19-year-old father Peter Dacre was working in London as a show business reporter for newspapers such as the Daily Express.

Quite how a fit 19-year-old managed to avoid call-up to the front line at that time God only knows.”

Lice. Sub human Tory lice. I came to the conclusion that the Right of this and every other Country in the World was made up of malicious, petty minded, bigoted and downright nasty people about twenty years ago. Since being in power, for nearly two decades and the dozen years in opposition I have seen or read the most outrageous smears and lies aimed at the weak and vulnerable in society.

I have seen the rich and powerful gleefully attack the disabled in the same fashion that scavengers feast on the dead in the wild. I have watched the Tory conference with dismay as the weak are paraded out for the vermin’s ‘two minute hate’. Orwell was right in that fashion if nothing else.

The Tories have always been evil. Not misguided, not wrong, they never ‘miss-interpreted the facts’ or merely cannot understand reality, they are scum who are driven by hatred of those the deem lower down the social ladder than they are. What they believe is driven by an unflinching analysis of what they want to achieve. They have not miss understood AGW, they understand it, but they simply do not care. They know that most unemployed people are decent, but they want to drive them into poverty. They know that disabled people are suffering but that is exactly what they want.

The Daily Mail printed this horrible attack on Ed’s dead father safe in the knowledge that most decent people would be repelled by it, but that is not their target audience. No they are after the scum vote and look, all the so called ‘decent but misguided’ Tories have made a half hearted defence of this attack.

Well all those on the centre or the centre left should read the hatchet job on Ralph and ask themselves ‘are these the type of people we want to be associated with’?

I think it is safe to say as the welfare State is slowly dismantled the second World War is finally over and we are returning to Victorian conditions as the ruling class are taking back the powers lent to us in the post war settlement.

That political consensus is well and truly over and we are now more polarised than ever So, the question is whose side are you on? Humans or the Tory vermin?

Do you think Miliband Sr also used to fantasize about exterminating Tory vermin, like Jim does? It must take a very special kind of person to feel hatred of such magnitude while simultaneously liking to imagine you have something positive to contribute to the stock of humanity.

Yes it is so annoying when the Working Class refuse to renounce their False Consciousness isn’t it? So galling that the Faily Mail and not the Guardian is the world’s most popular internet news site.

You do know that the Daily Mail’s target audience is the lower middle classes? C1-C2, weighted towards the C1s. Seriously, this is not esoteric knowledge confined to academics.

Have you just dusted off an old line about the Sun and reused it? Because, in the context, it at least would make sense. The working class papers are the Sun, the Star and the Mirror. I would link you to the Ipso MORI report on it, but it’s 35 pages and I’m worried that’s more then you’re prepared to digest before spouting your ill-informed opinions.

It’s precisely the lower middle class readership of the Mail that drives the left crazy with hatred (cf. Jim’s rantings). The proles are to be pitied and patronized, the celebs and liberal bourgeois to be sucked up to, but the solid unpretentious types in the middle who aren’t interested in having the left speak for them, and believe that the system can work for them with a bit of luck and hard graft – for the left they epitomize all that is bovine and reactionary. Plus ca chance plus we meme chose.

You need to catch-up on Trotsky, however, the Marxists supported the February revolutionary regime which were not socialist, it was only when it was clear that it was failing miserably that the Bolsheviks overthrew them in October.

That is the most insane reading of what Lenin thought of the Kerensky regime. It is also irrelevant. Trotsky had a conflicted attitude to the Stalinist regime. After all, he had worked to create it. Stalin had done what Trotsky wanted done. So his position was nuanced. But it was not that Stalinism was not socialism until much later.

And it was the Czar who waged war on Germany, sending peasants with pop-pop guns over land-mines.

Rubbish. Find a single example of the Tsarist Army doing that. While it is well documented that the Soviet Army simply attacked without paying any attention to landmines at all. Zhukov admitted as much. Boasted even. And they seem to have driven Ukrainian and Polish peasants before them to clear the way too.

As a good indicator of how civilised the Tsarist regime was is that in WW1 they lost some 1.8 million soldiers. With perhaps 3 million deaths in total. Russia lost at least 20 million people and about 10-12 million soldiers. That is how good Stalin’s war leadership was.

Yes the USSR supported Germany, as a country, they had little alternative. At least it gave the USSR breathing space to industrialize, which was fortunate for the rest of us.

They had a wide range of alternatives. Not least of which was not destroying Poland. In 1938 Germany could not attack the USSR because they did not share a border. But Stalin dismantled that glacis and made sure that Hitler came right up against the Soviet border. Nor was any remote degree of industrialisation taking place between 1939 when Stalin gave Hitler a free hand to attack the West and 1941.

R. Miliband fought against fascism for the working-class, Marx would certainly have supported those sentiments.

I agree totally. Traitors to the country that took them in both. We shouldn’t have in either case.

john b

Ralph Miliband was 17 when he arrived in the UK, at a time when scholars and historians of all ideological hues were far from clear on exactly what was going on in the USSR.

Actually everyone knew precisely what was going on in the Soviet Union. The Communists and their allies had great success in blurring the reality, but that was a late development. The Communists started out boasting about what they did. There was a series of trials which brought out the truth – and anyone could find a Russian refugee who would tell them if they wanted to.

What is more, it is implicit and explicit in the works of Lenin, Stalin and Marx. It is all euphemisms. But any fool knows what ruthless revolutionary terror means. This argument only applies to the Daily Mail. Because in that case, the Holocaust had not started yet, what little the Nazis were doing at the time was hidden and no one knew much. But of course you will not cut them any slack will you?

Shortly after he arrived, the UK government spent four years spreading the propaganda image of Stalin as our ally Uncle Joe. It’s absolutely batshit lunacy to blame him for that.

But not when he made those comments. 1940 was a time when Britain was unified in the fight against Nazism. This, for some reason, disgusted Ralph Miliband. Fascinating.

In the course of his academic career, he denounced Stalin, criticised the Soviet Hungarian and Czech invasions, and stated explicitly that western democracy deserved credit for respecting human rights far more than any communist regime had managed.

Where did he state explicitly that? And when? He was a Trot. Big deal. When Pol Pot was murdering a third of his country, where was RM? Oh that’s right, he was cheering them on.

ukliberty

A question is not a statement of what you think.

I agree. That is why I did not make a statement but asked a question. A question you continue to refuse to answer. You can tell it was a question because it had a question mark on the end.

or an implication I think something of the sort

I agree that it is possible to read an implication into what I said. But it was not an explicit statement. As it happens I don’t think you think that. I think you are such a fool and have such double standards, it did not occur to you. Deaths of Russians peasants, I would guess, do not figure highly in your scale of crimes.

either way you are a dishonest bell-end, which is why I rarely spend any time or effort replying to your spray-and-pray postings. 🙂

Won’t, can’t, whatever. It remains a fact that you have justified an apologist for mass murder, and you have stated that RM was somehow right to be appalled by a tiny number of British people’s past record of being soft on Fascism while ignoring RM’s open support of worse.

And did not notice the date when he arrived in the UK.

Now that everything you have said about Ralph has been shown to be false, do you have anything else to say?

So what I am getting from the Miliband Sr apologists is that he views towards communism were a bit like those of Nick Griffin’s towards Nazism – terrible mistakes were made, the wrong people were in charge, but the basic ideas were sound and it’s an experiment worth trying cautiously again.

I don’t think that he said terrible mistakes were made. He was more of a Trot so everything Stalin did was just peachy, if only Trotsky was in charge.

damon

The annoying thing about this whole issue is, that the Mail treats their readership with contempt, as if no one could ever discuss the merits and otherwise of a concept like Marxism. And could not understand why our parliamentary system is not necessarily the only and best way of running a society.

I don’t think that is treating them with contempt. I think that is treating them with respect. Because it is impossible to discuss the merits or otherwise of Marxism. In the same way that we cannot discuss the merits (which are incidentally greater than Stalinism) or otherwise of Naziism. Some things are just so vile that no decent human being can justify them. End of story.

It would be treating them with contempt to think there is even the slightest chance of any other conclusion.

gastro george

I see you are now channelling the mind of Stalin now. One of your many supernatural attributes.

Well I do have many magnificent attributes, but in this case I did not channel the mind of Stalin. I only referred to Stalinism. Which carried out the main plank of the socialist programme – he nationalised everything. How is that not socialism? Was Lenin a socialist? If so, how did the Revolution move from a good thing to a bad thing? But I don’t need to channel his mind. I can quote his words. Everything he said pointed out the fact that he thought he was a socialist. Every other socialist on the planet thought he was a socialist. What he tried to create was socialism.

Now you can whine about the end product, but it is just flatly impossible to deny that the Soviet Union was the largest and most comprehensive attempt to create real concrete socialism. If you think it was not, it is up to you to explain why not and where everything went wrong.

gastro george

“In 1944 when the 22-year old Ralph Miliband was bravely risking his life storming German positions protecting the Normandy beaches

Miliband was in the Navy. He did not storm any beaches.

Ceiliog

Oh, the Guardian with their nasty obituary of Margaret Thatcher – The swines!!!!!!

Actually I was thinking more of La Toynbee’s obituary of Auberon Waugh.

Because it is impossible to discuss the merits or otherwise of Marxism. In the same way that we cannot discuss the merits (which are incidentally greater than Stalinism) or otherwise of Naziism. Some things are just so vile that no decent human being can justify them. End of story.

You’re conflating a political philosophy with a party manifesto there, which isn’t even a slightly valid comparison.

The people who created and defined Naziism were the Nazi party, who implemented it as the genocidal hell we know and (hate/love, depending on whether we’re the Daily Mail or not). Their merits are unquestionably negligible.

Similarly, the people who created and defined Bolshevism were the Bolsheviks, who implemented it as the murderous hell we know and (hate/love, depending on whether we’re the Morning Star or not). Their merits are unquestionably negligible.

Marx wasn’t a Bolshevik. He was a political philosopher and economist, whose works were used as partial justification by the Bolsheviks – much as Nietzsche’s works were used as partial justification by the Nazis and other fascist movements. Neither Marx nor Neitzche can be blamed by anyone even vaguely sane for the actions of the Bolsheviks and the Nazis respectively.

When Pol Pot was murdering a third of his country, where was RM? Oh that’s right, he was cheering them on.

That’s about as false a characterisation of RM’s position on Cambodia and intervention as anyone could possible manage.

The Khmer Rouge was supported by the west; we backed them because they fought against the Soviet-backed Vietnamese government which ultimately overthrew them.

RM opposed the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia /despite/ believing that the Khmer Rouge government was “particularly tyrannical and murderous”, because of the wider consequences of allowing this to become a generally accepted cause of war:

For who is to decide, and on what criteria, that a regime has become sufficiently tyrannical to justify overthrow by military intervention? There is no good answer to this sort of question; and acceptance of the legitimacy of military intervention on the ground of the exceptionally tyrannical nature of a regime opens the way to even more military adventurism, predatoriness, conquest and subjugation than is already rife in the world today.

In other words, agree or disagree with RM’s position on Cambodia, it was based on solid and consistent reasoning, and involved *opposing* the action being taken by the USSR and its allies against a regime that he *hated*, because of the importance of the wider principle.

Psssst! listen! – everyone except SMFS – if we all creep away from this blog quietly, we might see SMFS arguing against his own posts with convoluted rebuttals based on factoids.

Maybe. But at least I would read them first. You still defending RM’s body of work which you freely admit you have not read?

john b

You’re conflating a political philosophy with a party manifesto there, which isn’t even a slightly valid comparison.

So you’re saying we have over looked the good points of Naziism as a political philosophy as opposed to a party platform? How interesting.

Marx wasn’t a Bolshevik. He was a political philosopher and economist, whose works were used as partial justification by the Bolsheviks

That is true. But when Marx defends Revolutionary Terror, when he says it is necessary, and when his pupils go on to carry out said political terror, I think we can conclude there is a link.

Neither Marx nor Neitzche can be blamed by anyone even vaguely sane for the actions of the Bolsheviks and the Nazis respectively.

I am not so sure about Nietzsche but let’s agree you are right. You cannot say the same for Marx as he specifically demanded things Lenin later did. Like murder entire classes.

That’s about as false a characterisation of RM’s position on Cambodia and intervention as anyone could possible manage.

Feel free to quote anything Miliband said about Pol Pot. He wrote a lot. Pol Pot was in power for 4 years from 1974 more or less to 1979. Ought to be easy to find a few condemnations.

The Khmer Rouge was supported by the west; we backed them because they fought against the Soviet-backed Vietnamese government which ultimately overthrew them.

Umm, no. What is more you are talking about the wrong period. What was RM’s position before 1979?

RM opposed the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia /despite/ believing that the Khmer Rouge government was “particularly tyrannical and murderous”, because of the wider consequences of allowing this to become a generally accepted cause of war:

Yes, he claimed that the Khmer Rouge should be allowed to murder whomever they wanted because what they did was not seriously enough to be a cause of concern and because worrying about it would strengthen the Western Right.

Nice position for someone to take.

In other words, agree or disagree with RM’s position on Cambodia, it was based on solid and consistent reasoning,

So was the Holocaust. It was just based on irrational assumptions.

and involved *opposing* the action being taken by the USSR and its allies against a regime that he *hated*, because of the importance of the wider principle.

RM opposed the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia /despite/ believing that the Khmer Rouge government was “particularly tyrannical and murderous”, because of the wider consequences of allowing this to become a generally accepted cause of war:

Sorry but where did RM ever describe the Khmer Rouge, which he had a long history of suppporting, as “particularly tyrannical and murderous”? Yes, if you overthrown one genocidal regime who knows where it might end? You might overthrow them all! The horror!

It remains a fact that you have justified an apologist for mass murder

Liar.

you have stated that RM was somehow right to be appalled by a tiny number of British people’s past record of being soft on Fascism while ignoring RM’s open support of worse.

You can’t help yourself can you? You have an extraordinary deficiency in honesty and/or reading comprehension. I said RM’s feelings as expressed in his teenage diary entry were “quite understandable”. I haven’t “ignored” what you claim I’ve “ignored”, I just haven’t addressed it – other people here have, more than adequately, so there is no need for me to repeat what they have said. I understand you have verbal diarrhea but the rest of us don’t. HTH. 🙂

As has been noted elsewhere, blaming Miliband (Ralph and, by extension, Ed … even David) and socialism for the evils of Stalin is like blaming Rowan Williams and Christianity for, I dunno, the conquistadors and colonialism.

But then, this is the Internet and the Daily Mail we’re talking about, so where did a sense of proportion ever come in.

‘As good an indicator of how civilized the Tsarist regime was…..in WW1 they lost l.8 million soldiers’

It’s a pity that his own army didn’t share your view, it was his waging war on Germany which was the final straw and lead to him (Czar) being deposed by his own. There is no doubt that the devastation that was Imperial Russia, the sorry state and the base which any new regime had to build on, was the sole consequence of the evil, greedy, dishonest absolute monarch. What followed in October, 1917 was driven by the environment. But hey, what’s a bit more revisionism?

Stalinism was certainly evil but a closer inspection of the history of the USSR might influence us to take a more Machiavellian view based on a lesser evil rather than a greater evil. There are few who hate Stalin who secretly believe that the course of history could have been much worse had he not prevailed.

118. Kojak
From your link:
“This event is open to LSE staff and students only, and a ticket is required.”
From the Daily Mail:
“‘Horrific’: David Miliband’s furious reaction as it emerges Gaddafi’s son gave university lecture in his father’s name”
You knew that before you posted didn’t you?

I remember the lecture being mentioned a couple of years ago when Saif Gaddafi lost favour and fingures, and even recall quotes from David Miliband about his irritation of his father’s memory being tainted by association. However nothing from Ed – possibly because he wasn’t the media darling that he is nowadays or possibly because at the time he wasn’t so bothered about his father’s memory.

I remember the lecture being mentioned a couple of years ago when Saif Gaddafi lost favour and fingures, and even recall quotes from David Miliband about his irritation of his father’s memory being tainted by association. However nothing from Ed – possibly because he wasn’t the media darling that he is nowadays or possibly because at the time he wasn’t so bothered about his father’s memory.

Please advise.

I’m not Ceiliog; but I’d advise you to stop wasting our time with irrelevancies?

“I’m not Ceiliog; but I’d advise you to stop wasting our time with irrelevancies?”

Exactly who do you think you are saying what is an irrelevance to a mobile story and what is a waste of other peoples time?

With one comment on the conversation you’re making proclamations trying to close down a discussion. Talk about being up your own backside …….

In case my message wasn’t clear enough I’ll spell it out. For the last week Ed Miliband has been defending the memory of his father. Two year ago his brother David was vocal about his irritation of the decision to allow Gaddafi’s son to give one of the series of Ralph Miliband Lectures at the LSE. The web is littered with articles reporting David Miliband’s annoyance but Ed Miliband’s reaction isn’t covered.

I would feel comfortable if I could see evidence that Ed Miliband’s escalating concerns for his father’s memory isn’t faux outrage directed for political purposes. Not an unreasonable point.

In case my message wasn’t clear enough I’ll spell it out. For the last week Ed Miliband has been defending the memory of his father. Two year ago his brother David was vocal about his irritation of the decision to allow Gaddafi’s son to give one of the series of Ralph Miliband Lectures at the LSE. The web is littered with articles reporting David Miliband’s annoyance but Ed Miliband’s reaction isn’t covered.

I would feel comfortable if I could see evidence that Ed Miliband’s escalating concerns for his father’s memory isn’t faux outrage directed for political purposes. Not an unreasonable point.

If you’ll remember, David’s response on that occasion was expressed as being on behalf of the family.

On this occasion, David hasn’t said anything; would you then conclude that he’s quite happy with his father being traduced as a hater of Britain, or would you take the more reasonable position that one brother reacting at a time is enough?

You’ve probably answered your own question, Ed probably derided the lecture but it was David who was the most prominent and consequently considered by the press to be more newsworthy, alternatively, Ed may have assumed that David’s well publicized criticism was enough. But I do have to agree with @122, it isn’t that relevant to the discussion, the Mail’s conduct is considered repulsive by those who do not support the Milibands or new lab.

“If you’ll remember, David’s response on that occasion was expressed as being on behalf of the family.

On this occasion, David hasn’t said anything; would you then conclude that he’s quite happy with his father being traduced as a hater of Britain, or would you take the more reasonable position that one brother reacting at a time is enough?”

I would think one brother at a time or the oldest brother talking on behalf of the family would be fine in usual circumstances.

The difference here is that by September 2010 Ed Miliband was leader of the Labour Party and it was his elder brother David who would speak on behalf of the family in 2011.

Surely by that time Ed Miliband, in the position of leader of the Labour Party, was able to speak for himself.

I don’t like the guilt by association attack conducted by Kojak in this thread. However, by chance, Kojak has raised a legitimate point.

Dvid Held (then a professor at the LSE) was closely linked with the £1.5 million donation by Libya to the LSE. David Held was also an informal adviser and friend of Ed Miliband. Thus when the Ralph Miliband memorial lecture was presented by a member of the Gaddafi family, Ed Miliband was conlicted, even though there is no suggestion that he was associated with the donation. It therefore fell upon David Miliband to protest on the family’s behalf.

The campaign against the LSE Libyan donation was led by Fred Halliday, an independent left thinker in the mould of Ralph Miliband. In a Daily Mail article about the donation, Halliday was personally abused whilst recognising that he had fuelled the fight. The author of that piece was Geoffrey Levy.

I didn’t think I was making a guilt by association attack on Ed Miliband – rather I thought I might have identified something by it’s absence.

Politicians of all persuasion are prone to exaggerate and manoeuvre the distance between what they say and what they think to their political advantage. Family matters can form part of this kind of behavior.

In this instance Ed Milliband appears to have cited his father’s experience when it suited him, ignored another’s cynical association with his father’s name when it might been awkward and then been outraged at an insensitive recollection of his memory and milked it for all it’s worth.

Empathy, indifference, outrage and advantage – the man’s a better actor than we took him for. A politician.

137. Charlieman
The book was edited by David Held, Angus Fane-Hervey and Marika Theros rather than authored.
Does contributing to a multi-authored publication indicate friendship? Have you got a substantial link?

You may not like people noticing what you’re doing but that is what you are doing. Deal with it.

You can’t help yourself can you?

Reporting what you say? Not really.

I said RM’s feelings as expressed in his teenage diary entry were “quite understandable”.

You claimed it is understandable that RM should have loathed Britain based on what a tiny number of people said about the Blackshirts years earlier – before he even set foot in the UK. While RM was utterly silent about his friends in the Communist Party actively undermining the British war effort. And he was also utterly silent about the twenty years of mass murder that had been taking place in the USSR up to that point. You think the comments of Lord Rothermere are justification for that loathing, but of course you do not think that anyone else’s loathing of RM for his silence is justified.

You have not been misquoted or misreported.

I haven’t “ignored” what you claim I’ve “ignored”, I just haven’t addressed it

Which is to say, you have ignored it. As I said, I just don’t think Russian peasants figure on your moral compass. Like a lot of the Left.

gastro george

As has been noted elsewhere, blaming Miliband (Ralph and, by extension, Ed … even David) and socialism for the evils of Stalin is like blaming Rowan Williams and Christianity for, I dunno, the conquistadors and colonialism.

I did not see anyone blame Ralph for Stalin. However there is no denying that Ralph is to blame for what he did and did not do. And given that Stalin remains the most serious, comprehensive and successful attempt to implement socialism, it follows that there are questions about the connections.

That was a Toynbee opinion piece. Polly T didn’t like Auberon Waugh and neither did Edwin Starr.

That makes a difference? The Telegraph’s obit for RM was overly generous in my opinion and it is impossible to think that his family objected in any way at all. Which is fairly amazing considering RM wanted their owners and most of their readership dead. PT’s article, no so much.

This defines decency for the Left – their right to do whatever they like, the Right’s total lack of authority to do anything at all.

The DM should not attack Ed Miliband over his father. Any more than they should go for Oswald Mosley’s children. But the Left is in no position to lecture on decency.

However there is no denying that Ralph is to blame for what he did and did not do. And given that Stalin remains the most serious, comprehensive and successful attempt to implement socialism, it follows that there are questions about the connections.

You see, here’s your problem; until you’ve established a connection, no such questions can arise.

Those are two statements about what you have written. What you think is a harder question I cannot really answer. And while it might be nice for you to think you can slay dragons in your dreams, it is only in your dreams. It is tedious for the rest of us to have to listen to it.

Robin Levett

You see, here’s your problem; until you’ve established a connection, no such questions can arise.

I have no need whatsoever to establish a link between Stalinism and socialism. It is obvious. It is undeniable. At least by anyone by a tiny cohort of Trots. And it would be a waste of my time to try.

Ceiliog

Proof please.

Umm, his life’s work? RM swore alligance at Marx’s tomb at the peak of Stalinist repression. He may not have liked Stalin but he liked the social system and the regimes Stalin created. He said so. Often. Even in the 1990s. So having signed on when Stalin was murdering kulaks, it is not hard to see RM 1. did not have a problem with mass murder and 2. Britain would have been screwed had he got his way given virtually everyone in the UK is richer than a Russian kulak.

You see, here’s your problem; until you’ve established a connection, no such questions can arise.

I have no need whatsoever to establish a link between Stalinism and socialism. It is obvious. It is undeniable. At least by anyone by a tiny cohort of Trots. And it would be a waste of my time to try.

The link you were claiming was between Ralph Miliband and Stalinism. Any link was a negative one – he described Stalinism as, among other things “viciously repressive and cruel” – as you know. You also know, because you’ve read the essay, that he didn’t consider Stalinism to be socialism or even on the way there – no more than he did capitalism.

No I wasn’t. Actually. Perhaps there should have been a paragraph break there, but this is what you get when you intervene in a conversation between other people you do not understand. Our resident Trots are denying Stalinism was socialism. I pointed out given it was the largest and most comprehensive attempt to build socialism, if they think it isn’t socialism it is up to them to show how it came about and where things went wrong.

Any link was a negative one – he described Stalinism as, among other things “viciously repressive and cruel” – as you know.

Towards the end of his life. When he was a British academic and could hardly get away with calling Stalin a hero. But in 1940? He seems to have adopted the Stalinist line and opposed Britain’s war effort.

Towards the end of his life. When he was a British academic and could hardly get away with calling Stalin a hero. But in 1940? He seems to have adopted the Stalinist line and opposed Britain’s war effort.

In 1973 he was calling Stalinism a monstrous tyranny; he was 49 then- was he near the end of his life? And I know for a fact that Stalin remained a hero in the eyes of some on the left even at the end of the 60s – after Prague.

Can you find any writing of Miliband’s which is inconsistent with the attitude expressed above? And no, a 16 year old’s diary entry expressing impatience with the arrogant English doesn’t count.

SMFS has a political view which is challenged by socialist theory, he is not alone, neither is he alone in using the USSR as a pointer of what socialism is. Distorting history was the line of most western countries during the cold war and it proved an easy propaganda campaign, up to the present it has enabled the views of SMFS to prevail without question other than in certain areas, one of those is LC. And when the leader of the only major socialist party in the UK rejects socialism, he gets an easy ride.

Pointing to Ed M as wishing to implement socialist policies by price freezing and then using his father’s political views to support this, is an opportunity that the daily fail couldn’t let go by. And whatever Cameron says in support of Ed, he knows that it’s probably benefitted the tories.

Theories alone make weak challenges. Evidence is what is required. And what you do when faced with all the failed attempts to realise the socialist vision is retreat behind your “socialist theory”, for which there is no credible evidence. Your socialist theory is a socialist faith. In other words, what you believe in is a fantasy.

You are entitled to your fantasies, of course. Unfortunately, you are not sceptical about or critical of your fantasies. So you and your comrades want to destroy the existing social order to impose your fantasies on the rest of us. When we know that abrupt revolutionary change rarely, if ever, works out well.

“Theories alone make weak challenges. Evidence is what is required. And what you do when faced with all the failed attempts to realise the socialist vision is retreat behind your “socialist theory”, for which there is no credible evidence. Your socialist theory is a socialist faith. In other words, what you believe in is a fantasy.”

This is the most laughable drivel that rabid rentiers and their lackeys peddle. The evidence also shows that you can replace the word ‘socialist’ in your statement with ‘laissez faire capitalism’ ‘neo-Liberalism’ ‘high finance’ and other fig leafs of the rentier class’s modesty, and still see the same blood stains of their worldwide raping. Only it will never be reported as such by the rentier’s propaganda tools, which you swallow wholesale.

Come to think of it, there would be no such thing as the poor to start with if your ideology worked as you complacently imply it does. Therefore no such thing in our history books as revolutions, no need for institutions like secret police and the punitive laws your favourite rentiers bring in against the poor worldwide.

Oh and one more thing, as people like Abramovich show, the kind of economic elite in a capitalist system are interchangeable with the kind of elite a ‘socialist’ system produces. After all, he was a Commisar in the old USSR wasn’t he, as were an awful lot of the rich of Russia. In a capitalist guise you admire him as an ‘entrepreneur’, even though he stole from and betrayed the people of his hometown to accumulate ‘his’ fortune in the first place. Yet he is the same person who was an ‘evil commie’ in pre-collapse USSR.

The sad irony is, if you rentiers and lackeys weren’t so addicted to your hierarchical status, you would still live a very comfortable life, only without any need for those prison bars you surround yourself with in that fortress mansion or gated community…

My fantasy is laissez-faire if you’re really interested and you are correct, abrupt revolutionary change rarely, if ever works. Of course, marxism is an evolutionary theory (Marx was a great admirer of Darwin) that’s why socialism is unlikely to emerge from any peasant society and, as you have noted, attempts to implement it on such have failed.

Unfortunately, like laissez-faire, socialism remains a theory at this point.

Then your fantasy is even more incoherent than I imagined! Whatever “socialist theory” tells you, Marxism and laissez-faire are incompatible, as no sane and very few uncoerced people would freely agree to live under any form of Marxism and its unworkable form of distributive justice.

tone: This isn’t about Marxism or your fantasies. The article is about a trash, ill thought out judgement by a newspaper.
So nobody would support equal human dignity, equal human rights, equal right to health care (NHS) and duties to others in serious need?
Or
Are you saying that people would only support equality if there was money in it for them i.e. coercion?

Marxism and laissez-faire are indeed incompatible but where did I say that they were compatible? And as you agree that socialism does not exist, how do you know that distribution would be unworkable?

And as @161 suggests, this thread is about an article accusing R. Miliband of loathing Britain, you have taken the same stance as the daily fail and (wrongly) extrapolated that because someone dislikes capitalism then they must dislike everything about a capitalist country. It is possible to dislike the institution of monarchy but not dislike the monarch as an individual, socialists dislike the capitalist system and the social relations therein, but not those individuals who are part of it.

@154
Perhaps you can name any British revolutionary socialist who you know loathes Britain.

154
I dislike caviar therefore I must like rat on toast.
A friend of the family, who died recently, was what you’d label a revolutionary socialist. He was an Army Captain in WWII and fought in the Burma Campaign.

In 1973 he was calling Stalinism a monstrous tyranny; he was 49 then- was he near the end of his life? And I know for a fact that Stalin remained a hero in the eyes of some on the left even at the end of the 60s – after Prague.

As a Trot he would have had trouble in a Stalinist party. It took a long time for him to notice the obvious if this is what you’re claiming. Stalin was about to enjoy a second lease of life in 1973 as students since the Sixties had been defending him in practice even if not in theory. They went out on the streets to march behind his loyal lieutenant Ho’s flag.

But again, the nature of the Trot is to have a problem with Stalin, not Stalin’s murders of peasants. You can see that nuance in RM’s approach to Spain:

The classic case of justified external military help is (or perhaps more accurately should have been) that of the Spanish Civil War, where a liberal-left government was faced with a military rebellion of fascist inspiration, backed by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The International Brigade that was then formed, mostly at Communist initiative, was the most remarkable example of international socialist solidarity and of ‘proletarian internationalism’ in history. And for all the many foul features of Soviet help to the Spanish Republic, that help also falls under the rubric of international solidarity. What was wrong with Soviet intervention is that there was not enough of it; and that one of the forms it took was the liquidation of large numbers of anti-Stalinists who were fighting for the Republic.

The problem is not Stalinism. That is something that RM was fine with. The problem was with Stalin executing good Communists. Trotsky’s dilemma in fact – Trotsky’s mass murders of peasants is right and just, but Stalin’s murder of Trotsky and his friends are not.

Or with his support of Cuba and Soviet intervention overseas:

Whatever the Soviet Union’s motives may be, the help it accords to revolutionary movements and regimes is something that socialists cannot but welcome and support. The Cuban regime is now a repressive dictatorship of the Soviet-type model. But in comparison with other regimes in the Third World – many of them murderous dictatorships of an incomparably worse kind, yet completely supported by the United States and other capitalist powers – it is also a progressive regime.

So he is fine with Stalinist mass murder in Cuba.

And no, a 16 year old’s diary entry expressing impatience with the arrogant English doesn’t count.

Yes it does. And he is not expressing impatience with British arrogance. When Britain was united in defiance of the Nazis – in 1940! – he expressed disgust they were so nationalistic. That is, that they were united in the fight against the Nazis.

ukliberty

So “opposed” that he tried various connections to join up!

Not in 1940. He did not join the Belgian Navy until 1943. He seems to have spent his time in between advancing his academic career.

john b

Just for the record, Miliband describes the KR as “tyrannical and murderous” here.

Where? You mean he uses those two words in close proximity to the two words Khmer and Rouge? He does not say it himself. What he does say is:

This is the argument that, whatever may be said against military intervention in most cases, it is defensible in some exceptional cases, namely in the case of particularly tyrannical and murderous regimes, for instance the regime of Idi Amin in Uganda and of Pol Pot in Kampuchea.

Notice, he is not stating his opinion. He is stating an opinion that some other people (by obvious inference, Right Wing people in the West) hold. He immediately follows this by saying why this does not and cannot apply to Cambodia:

The argument is obviously attractive: one cannot but breathe a sigh of relief when an exceptionally vicious tyranny is overthrown. But attractive though the argument is, it is also dangerous. For who is to decide, and on what criteria, that a regime has become sufficiently tyrannical to justify overthrow by military intervention? There is no good answer to this sort of question; and acceptance of the legitimacy of military intervention on the ground of the exceptionally tyrannical nature of a regime opens the way to even more military adventurism, predatoriness, conquest and subjugation than is already rife in the world today.

So notice he supports Soviet intervention in Angola to keep UNITA out of power – despite no particular level of mass murder being committed therein – but he does not support the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge. Why not?

His opposition to the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Hungary are similarly nuanced in a Trotskyite manner. He does not oppose them as such. He simply says that the Soviet claims of counter-revolution were untrue. That there was no chance of a restoration of capitalism and hence no need to invade. By inference, had there been a chance of capitalism being restored, Miliband would have supported the invasions.

And by the way, he routinely in this article conflates Stalinism and socialism. For example:

One of the many blights which Stalinism cast on socialist thinking was the habit-indeed the requirement – to view favoured regimes (beginning with Stalin’s own) as unblemished examples of socialist construction; and the habit at least did not die with Stalin.

Fabians – the wearing down of an enemy over whatever time it takes (Jew slang for Gentiles is Min or Minim,” (Christians) “Min-ute Man” is awaiting in a silo near you!
“Originally featuring a 330 kiloton” (33 is cabalist number – like top ‘invited’ degree of masonry, top echelon of pyramid etc)

A Russian-Jew extraction, 5th columnist, USA traitor, handed the Russians the plans for Nuclear Bomb development which cut out years of research!

World ‘Fast-tracked’ into a Cold War stand-off by the zionists!

——————————————-
“The false Jewish Christians, who then lived in arduous slavery, after their monstrous conspiracy had failed, saw in the conciliatory intentions and the just striving for unity of the realm, which they attributed to Witiza, the means of freeing themselves from the terrible punishment and of regaining their lost influence. They attained that he release them from the sorrowful servitude and – at least for the moment – placed them equal with the rest of his subjects. Witiza fell into the trap like others and believed the Jewish problem could be solved through Christian-Jewish reconciliation, which, on the foundation of mutual respect, equal rights, greater understanding and even brotherly and friendly coexistence of Christians and Jews, would make an end to a century-long struggle and would secure the internal peace of the kingdom.

Such reconciliation can be a wonderful, desirable solution, but is only possible when both sides really wish it. But if the one side acts in good faith and sacrifices for reconciliation its justified defence, it destroys its own means of defence and must trust powerlessly in the honesty of the other side. The latter on the contrary only utilises the magnanimous conduct of its former opponent and awaits the moment to give it its death thrust. Then the apparent reconciliation and the false brotherhood are only a prelude to death, or at least to collapse.

This has always occurred when Christians and pagans allow themselves to be deceived by the skilled diplomatic manoeuvres of the Jews and believed in their friendship and loyalty. For the Jews unfortunately only utilise these subtle requests in order to disarm those whom they secretly regard in their deepest hearts always as deadly foes, in order then, when they have once been lulled asleep through the aromatic nectar of friendship and brotherhood and are disarmed, to easily enslave or destroy them. The Jews have always followed the norm, if they are weak or dangerously threatened, of giving themselves out as friends of their foes, in order to be able to easier rule them. Unfortunately, they have had success with this manoeuvre in the course of centuries and still also today.

Jewish diplomacy is classic: In order to arouse sympathy, they describe the persecutions, slavery and murders, which their people has suffered, in the blackest colours, but carefully conceal the motives through which they themselves called forth these persecutions. If they have been successful in inoculating pity, they attempt to transform it into sympathy.( constant jew whining on tv progs) Accordingly they fight without pause, in order to attain all possible advantages on grounds of this pity and sympathy. These advantages have always been directed at destroying the defence erected against them by Christian or pagan clergy or civil authorities, so that the Jews can set their plans for conquest over the unfortunate state into fact, which has naively destroyed the walls which earlier rulers had erected for defence against Jewish conquest.

Gradually, the Jews gain greater influence in the land through this manoeuvre, which affords them hospitality, and they go from being the persecuted to become merciless persecutors of the real patriots, who attempt to defend their religion or their land against the rule and destruction of the undesired aliens, until the Jews finally rule or destroy the Christian or pagan state, always according to what is planned.

Thus it also occurred under the rule of Witiza. At first the Jews were successful in arousing his pity and inoculating him with sympathy, so that he freed them from the hard servitude which the 17th Council of Toledo and King Egica had imposed upon them as defence against their plans of conquest. The defence of Holy Church and of the Visigoth monarchy against Jewish imperialism was thus demolished. Witiza placed them equal with the Christians as brothers, in order to later go still further, as is revealed by the renowned Chronicles of the 13th century, which were written by the Archbishop Roderich (Rodericus Toletanus, “De rebus Hispaniae”) and Bishop Lucas de Tuy (“Chronicle of Lucas Tudensis”). Here it is described to us that, when the Jews had once gained the sympathy of the monarch, the latter protected and favoured them and allotted them greater honours than the churches and prelates.

As one sees they were successful, after their liberation and the granting to them of equal rights, in occupying higher positions than the prelates and Churches. All these measures naturally aroused the dissatisfaction of the Christians and clergy who zealously defend the Church. It is well possible that this increasing resistance finally influenced Witiza to strengthen the position of his new Jewish allies. As the Bishop Lucas de Tuy writes in his Chronicle, he caused those to be summoned back whom the Councils and the previous kings had banished from the Gothic kingdom. These returned in great number into their new promised land, in order to enlarge and strengthen their growing power in the Visigoth kingdom.115

The historian of the previous century, José Amador de los Rios, who is known on account of his skilled defence of the Jews, admits, however, that Witiza, in relation to the Jews, undertook exactly the opposite of what his father and his predecessors had done: At a new national Council Witiza revoked the old Church laws and the laws which had been enthusiastically accepted by the nation, in order not to have to confess to the Catholic faith. He released those baptised from their oath, and finally placed many members of this despised race in high positions.

The consequence of these tumultuous incomprehensible measures was soon to be seen. In a short time the Jews had attained a really dangerous predominance and utilised all opportunities for their advantage. And perhaps out of revenge they welded new plans and secretly prepared to avenge themselves also for the humiliation under the Visigoth rule.116 This historian, whom no one can accuse of Anti-semitism and who in general is regarded by the Jewish historians as reliable source, has described to us with few words the terrible consequences which the policy of King Witiza, with its enticements to free the repressed Jews and later to attain the Christian-Jewish reconciliation and the reconciliation of both peoples – at the beginning of his period of government – had for Christians.”

@164. So Much For Subtlety: “As a Trot he would have had trouble in a Stalinist party. It took a long time for him to notice the obvious if this is what you’re claiming.”

Having failed to demonstrate that Ralph Miliband was a Stalinist, SMFS strives to show that Ralph Miliband was a Trotskyite.

I read Ralph Miliband during the prime years of UK Trot activity. RM’s words bored the tits off me; the places where nipples formerly existed on my chest are replaced by a smear, under which one can vaguely read ‘ennui’. I cannot recall Ralph Miliband backing any UK Trot group or the CPGB.

Ralph Miliband was his own man. He was not the man for me. But I despise people who smear anybody.